Internal controls documentation

What a lender or auditor is really checking

A bank, an investor or a licensed auditor asking about internal controls is not really asking whether controls exist on paper. They want to see one thing: could the person who raised last month's biggest payment also have approved it and reconciled the account it left from, with nobody else looking. If that gap only lives in one person's head, it will surface the moment someone outside the team asks about it.

Watching the process, not reading the policy

We sit alongside your team through an actual financial close, then through a purchase ledger cycle, a sales ledger cycle and a payroll run, watching how the work happens day to day rather than how a policy document three years old describes it. What comes out is a plain narrative of the real process, plus a control matrix built from it, each control named, an owner attached, a frequency attached.

The one-person problem

Lean UAE finance teams, on the mainland or inside a free zone, often concentrate three roles in one person: setting up a new vendor, releasing payment to them, and reconciling the account afterwards. We name that concentration directly and propose something workable, most often a second sign-off above an agreed value, instead of adding another line to a checklist nobody follows.

Where our role stops

Documenting a process is not the same as certifying that it operated effectively across a period. That opinion, where one is needed, belongs to a licensed UAE audit firm, never to us.

Companies later facing a service organisation examination for a US or European customer tend to reuse this same matrix inside SOC readiness bookkeeping, and an auditor asking for evidence of a specific control usually finds it inside working papers. We date every version, since a control document nobody updates goes stale the moment a role or a system changes underneath it.